Website of the day: British Pathé on YouTube

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It’s rare that we’d look to something like YouTube to fill this slot, but in the week that the daddy of video sharing websites celebrated its ninth birthday, we think we’ve got an excuse. Because something extraordinary has happened.

British Pathé, the definitive film news gathering outfit of the 20th Century, has uploaded its entire library to YouTube. In high definition too. That means you can trawl through over 85,000 hours of classic filmed news footage of global events stretching right back to 1896.

There aren’t too many major events that aren’t covered here (we may even see a new game whereby you try to find things that don’t have footage) and when you consider this, you’ll probably agree that this is an astonishing achievement.

We reckon this is possibly one of the most significant historical archives to be made public and it's probably the best YouTube hole you could ever disappear down.